Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Typing Kurdish

Kurdish (كوردی) is the official language of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and ever-increasing amounts of Kurdish text are being produced in Arabic script. While OS X 10.4 does not include a Kurdish keyboard layout, there is one you an download on my iDisk. A large number of free kurdish fonts have recently been made available from KurdITGroup. Unfortunately these are for Windows, but you should be able to use them correctly on a Mac with the applications Mellel or OpenOffice. For other apps, the normal OS X default font, Geeza Pro, probably does not do totally correct Kurdish orthography, and it is better to use one of the SIL fonts, Lateef AAT or Scheherazade AAT.

Ali -- you put the .keylayout file in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, and then go to system prefs/language & text/input sources and check its box, plus the box for Show Input Menu in Finder, then select it in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder.

Hi I have a .doc file in kurdish language for an katalog design. I work with Mac OS 10.4.11.When I open the file the script changes into arabic fonts... Where can I find kurdish font for mac? Please Help

No Tom, this doesnt work for me. (Mac OS X 10.6.8) If I'm sent Kurdish text from a PC user in Word doc, it changes to Arabic when I open it - and all the Kurdish accents disappear. It doesnt read correctly in Kurdish.What to do? Reluctant to have dual Windows/Mac set-up.